


Background Radiation of the Universe

by unbelieve



Category: The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Mention of Past Suicide Attempt, creative liberties taken with how hospitals work, mention of past character death, rating is for swearing tho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:41:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22163470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unbelieve/pseuds/unbelieve
Summary: Minho ends up needing to go to the hospital on New Year’s Eve, and what was Newt going to do, let him Uber to the emergency room?
Relationships: Minho/Newt (Maze Runner)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 55
Collections: Pieces of Minewt





	Background Radiation of the Universe

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t know how to write a holiday fic in time for the actual holiday lmao

So they’re in the emergency room on New Year’s Eve, and that’s not really ideal. 

They’re in the emergency room, and it’s New Year’s Eve, and there hadn’t even been alcohol involved. It’s just that Minho’s appendix had a terrible sense of timing, and Newt had been sitting squarely in the center of the Venn diagram of “sober enough to drive” and “probably too nice for his own good,” so now they’re in the waiting room surrounded by people whose emergency room visits probably actually were alcohol related. 

Minho’s pissed about the whole thing, clearly, although Newt’s pretty sure at least three-quarters of the glowering is to cover up the amount of pain he’s in. The remaining quarter is probably the nature of the pain itself, and the fact that it didn’t stem from something suitably dramatic. Minho had always said that if he was going to die, it had better be in spectacular fashion, and if Newt had understood something he’d muttered in the car correctly, hospital visits needed to meet the same criteria. Appendicitis probably didn’t measure up.

(“‘If’ you’re going to die?” Newt had asked the first time, eyebrows raised.

“If,” Minho had repeated. “If something tries to kill me and it’s not cool enough, I just won’t die.”

And yeah, it was a joke, but Newt had always figured if anyone could pull it off it would be Minho.)

Minho’s gripping the chair arm so hard his knuckles are white, wrist bent into a position that has to be brutally uncomfortable. Without really thinking, Newt offers his hand. Minho looks at it, glances up at his face, and takes it.

Newt regrets the whole thing almost immediately. Minho has more grip strength than seems like should be humanly possible, and they may as well stay in the emergency room, because it seems inevitable that one of the smaller bones in his hand is going to splinter under this kind of pressure. 

One of the guys across the waiting room, whose split lip and bruised, bloody nose probably speak to a fight, is staring at their interlocked hands. The swelling makes it impossible to tell what his expression is. Newt sends a measured look at him- not quite a challenge, just to let him know that he’s been seen- and the guy drops his gaze. 

Newt looks back over at Minho, only to find Minho watching him. “You know, for someone who’s so not scary,” he says, “you can be kind of scary.”

Newt’s not sure that’s true, but he does kind of like the hint of admiration in Minho’s voice. 

Minho’s hit with another wave of pain, then, because his grip on Newt’s hand gets tighter again. Newt is pretty sure he’ll be unsurprised when something inevitably cracks, although he’s really not looking forward to it. 

And then they call Minho’s name. They’re led to a small examination room with chairs outside, and all too quickly Minho’s whisked away and Newt is left waiting with nothing to distract him from how much he hates hospitals. God, he fucking hates hospitals.

 _Ground yourself,_ he thinks, making the thought as loud as he can. He presses his left thumb into the bone of his right wrist, waiting for the pressure, the almost-bruising to center him. _You’re not sixteen with a broken leg. You’re not eighteen with a dying boyfriend. You’re twenty-two and you’re here with Minho and he’s going to be perfectly okay._

He breathes in, he breathes out. He reminds himself that he trusts his therapist with his life, and works through every trick he knows. It works, mostly. His heartbeat steadies, the bounce of his leg slows from mania to panic to what could pass for just impatience. 

He checks his phone. He’s ignored his texts for too long, apparently, because the messages have gone from general “is everything okay”s in the groupchat to texts directly to him to three calls from Thomas and two from Brenda. 

He messages the group with, “He’s in for examination. I’ll let you know when I find out anything else,” then spends a couple minutes switching between Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat, never actually looking at any of it. He flips through a magazine without really reading a word, mostly just looking back down the hallway at the flow of people in and out of the ER. He performs triage mentally as they come in, sorting them as best he can by severity. His first three guesses are completely wrong, based on the order they actually get taken back in. Probably a good thing he never planned on med school. 

The door opens, and Minho, trailing the doctor, sends a shaka his way. “Guess who’s getting an appendectomy?”

“Gonna go out on a limb and guess it’s you.”

“I’ve always said you were an underrated genius.”

The doctor says, “We’re just waiting for someone to come by with a wheelchair, and then we can transport him to- there she is.”

As soon as the nurse comes into view with the wheelchair, Newt can feel Minho about to start an argument.

“Sit in the bloody wheelchair,” he says, before Minho can say anything. 

“See? Scary.” But he does as he’s told, so there’s that. 

The strain in Minho’s expression has gotten worse over the last few minutes, and Newt has to fight the urge to ask if they can’t just move a little bit faster with the whole thing. The journey to the surgical wing feels like they travel half the country, although it can’t be far at all. He’s not usually this impatient. He’s only sometimes this afraid. 

The nurse talks to Minho a little, although his answers are shorter, a little sharper than they’d usually be. Newt fills in the gaps as best he can, although he’s not sure he’s coming across as composed as he’d like to. 

When they finally reach their destination, Minho says, “Catch you on the flip side” and mock-salutes, and then he’s gone. 

Newt takes a seat and tries not to keep staring at the door, trying to blend in with the few other people in the waiting room. Maybe it’s his imagination, but it feels like people are looking at him, judging him, although he’s not quite sure on what grounds. 

The nurse who had transported Minho comes back a minute later, headed to the ER, but she stops when she sees Newt. “Are you okay?”

So yeah, not composed at all, then. “Fine. Just- worried, you know?” Which is true, he is, but it’s been hard to even think about anything bad happening to Minho when he’s trying not to drown under bad things that already happened. His anxiety will inevitably make it up to the present day at some point, but it’s not quite there yet.

“I can promise you he’s being taken care of. We’ve still got our A-team on, even for holidays.” She smiles, and Newt pulls every scrap of reassurance from it that he can. She hadn’t said that he’d be okay, or that everything would be okay, and he’s glad of that. He doesn’t trust people who promise things they can’t know.

“Thank you,” he says, and watches her leave. 

It’s not until he gets a text from Thomas that he realizes he’s left the groupchat hanging. 

“He’s in for surgery,” he writes, leaving it at that. He’s about to set his phone down when he gets a text from Gally, just one on one. Even without reading it, that’s enough to make him pause. They’d repaired a friendship that had ranged from disconnected to outright hostile, but almost all of their texts conversations were still just utilitarian, dates and times and places. 

They definitely don’t talk about feelings, but the text from Gally reads, “u okay man?”

“Fine,” Newt sends back. He forgets sometimes that he’s known Gally since they were fifteen, before he’d known Thomas or Teresa or Brenda. Other than Minho and Frypan, out of the country and offline, no one else would know quite how much this would wear on him. He just hadn’t expected Gally to actually acknowledge it. 

“would’ve taken him if i could drive without killing us,” Gally sends back. 

That would have been a difficult task, given that most of the group had been well on their way to drunk before Minho had shown up late and then, after they’d caught him staring at the wall, face tight, finally admitting he was in pain, but Newt appreciates the sentiment nonetheless. He’d love to be far away from here, but he didn’t drink much anymore, ostensibly on the grounds that someone had to look after their dumb asses, but actually on the grounds that drinking tended to make him really, really fucking morbid, so here he was.

Although he’s not really sure if he could stand to be anywhere else.

He writes back, “One in the hospital is enough for one day. thanks though.”

And it’s stupid, but that’s when the reality of the situation, the actual here-and-now situation finally hits him. He’s finally managing not to think about crippling himself, about Alby’s death, but since he’s apparently incomplete without all-consuming anxiety about something, he can’t stop thinking about Minho. 

Logically, he knows it’ll almost definitely be okay. When they were trying to figure out whether they needed to go to the hospital, what it could be, he’d seen the statistics. 200,000 cases in the US a year. One in twenty people, at some point during their lives. Obviously, most of them are fine. It’s just that the thought of anything happening to Minho terrifies him in a way few things could, starting at a place deep inside of him he doesn’t dare to touch. 

It’s been the two of them for so long, the two of them through every single fucking terrible thing. It’s been Minho visiting him in the hospital with a curated playlist of stupid YouTube videos, keeping him from staring blankly at the wall for hours. It’s been Newt picking glass out of Minho’s hand when he smashed a family photograph the day his parents stopped speaking to him because they “didn’t agree with his choices.” It’s been everything in between, high school and college and first post-graduation jobs, an unspoken promise that they will share the good and the bad. It might kill him to lose that. 

He runs through the grounding exercises again, but they don’t work as well this time. He counts ceiling tiles, runs his thumb over the ridges of his phone case and takes note of every detail, measures his breaths out carefully. They distract him for a moment, and not much more. 

He sits. He waits. He does his best to talk himself down from an anxiety attack, or at the very least to delay it. When it feels like sitting still might be the death of him, he paces the hallway to the bathrooms. At some point, he crosses paths with a girl who seems to be doing the same thing, and they give each other tightrope smiles, careful balancing acts too close to falling. He wonders who she’s here for, hopes everything will turn out okay for them. 

And then finally, _finally,_ they come to find him, let him know the surgery went well and Minho’s okay, and he can breathe for the first time in hours. 

They take him back to the room Minho’s in, still seemingly shaking off the drug haze but mostly lucid. 

Newt asks, “How are you feeling?” which might not be fair because it’s always felt like the kind of question that asks for too much at once, but he feels like he needs to ask anyway. 

“I’ll be real with you,” Minho says dryly. “I am not at a hundred percent.” He barely even tries to play it off, exhaustion clinging to every word, and suddenly Newt is trying to remember the last time he’d seen Minho this defenseless. The two of them have always been tandem constructions, walls built up brick by salvaged brick to protect the last few undamaged pieces, but right now they’re looking at each other and all their walls are down. 

It’s odd. It’s not bad. But it’s odd.

“You don’t look so great either,” Minho says, breaking Newt’s concentration.

Newt grimaces a little, just a reflex. “Hospitals.”

“Hospitals,” Minho repeats, nodding. “Guess I forgot. Wouldn’t have asked you to come with me if I’d been thinking.”

“Your bloody appendix almost ruptured, I’m not about to hold this against you. What else were you planning on doing?”

“Uber?”

“It’s important to me that you know I would not have let you Uber to the emergency room.” Newt puts all the lightness he can into it, but the core is this: I will not abandon you. Not the way your family did, not the way your fair-weather friends do the moment you’re no longer easy to be around. Not at all.

Minho gives him a half-smile, and Newt thinks he understands the parts of that left unspoken. “Thanks, bro. What time is it?”

“11:57.”

“Fuck, I’m not gonna get a New Year’s kiss.”

“Were you going to anyway?”

Minho flips him off, but then winks. “A man can dream.”

Newt feels like he’s on unsteady ground suddenly, although he’s not quite sure why.  
In an attempt to find his footing, he says, “The group keeps asking about you. Anything in particular you want me to tell them?”

“You know that ‘I lived bitch’ picture?”

Newt sighs and sends the group an “I lived bitch” Snapchat of Minho. 

“You’re a real one, Isaac Newton Ross,” Minho says. “Perhaps the only truly real one.”

And yeah, that’s definitely not his name, thanks, but Newt doesn’t much feel like arguing that point for the thousandth time. 

Instead he says, “You know what’s weird? Gally texted me to ask if I was doing alright.”

“Deadass?”

“Yeah.”

“Damn.” Minho frowns. “How many drinks in does Gally have to be to talk about emotions?”

“That’s kind of what I was wondering, but I’m not sure I want to know.”

“Yeah, not when their adult supervision is here.”

“They’re all technically adults.”

“See, I notice you said ‘technically.’”

“I did say that.”

“I’ve heard at least two of them call you Mom behind your back.”

“Which two?” Newt levels a look at him, the kind that usually works on lesser beings.

Minho’s apparently long past immune, though, which Newt really should have expected. “Snitches get stitches, and I’m really not in the mood for more at the moment.” 

“I am going to figure this out at some point.”

“I’m sure you will. Don’t bring my name into it.”

“Noted.”

There’s a bang and they both jump, Minho wincing immediately after, before it’s followed by another, and oh, right, New Year’s. Fireworks. Midnight.

Minho’s stupid joke about New Year’s kisses. 

The one that was very definitely just a joke, except Newt can’t get it out of his head for some reason. Except he kind of can’t stop wondering what it would be like to kiss Minho. Forget Minho’s appendix, Newt is the one with a truly horrible sense of timing. 

He’s in love with his best friend. That’ll complicate things. 

What he should do is just shut it down and continue with his life, leaving things between them the same as ever. Except they haven’t really been the same lately, have they? Looking back, their touches have lingered in a way they hadn’t before. Glances have held some kind of weight that they didn’t previously carry, something he’d noticed and filed away until later but had shied away from really trying to figure out. More than ever, it keeps being just the two of them away from the group, private conversations and shared jokes even when the others are around. 

So maybe it’s not just him. Maybe it’s not just him, and maybe he’s decided then and there that his New Year’s resolution is to take a fucking chance for once. 

He leans in and kisses Minho. 

There’s a second where everything is in limbo. If Minho doesn’t react well, they can pretend it’s only a continuation of the joke, and after a day or so, it’ll just be something to laugh about. Their friendship has survived far, far worse. But if he does...

And then Minho’s pulling him down and kissing him again. Newt has a moment of panic as he struggles to balance himself without putting his hand directly down on Minho, which wouldn’t end well, but then he sorts that out and _holy shit._

Kissing Minho feels _right._ The background radiation of his own personal universe, the fear and the strain and the memories he’s always trying to outrun- it all goes quiet, and the only thing left is Minho’s lips on his, Minho’s hand twisted into his shirt. It’s easy in a way nothing in his life ever is and he doesn’t ever want to pull away, but leaning over a hospital bed isn’t sustainable for long. 

“Happy fucking New Year,” Minho says when they finally separate, just barely this side of breathless.

Newt laughs. “Happy fucking New Year, indeed.”


End file.
